Pumpkin doughnuts – time-sucking little bastards

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Who needs to think when your feet just go?” – Tom Tom Club, “Genius of Love”

It is hard to overstate the tedium of my life – I don’t mind most of it but I have had my fill of some aspects. I laugh in the face of the people who sometimes tell me they admire what I have done with my life or that they think it is so exotic or exciting that I have moved to different countries and so on. It really only sounds exciting on paper – everyday life is a whole heck of a lot like yours. Or yours. Or yours.

To think that the mindless repetition of filling and refilling these six little cavities in my doughnut pan is less tedious than some of life’s less savory bits. Long ago, I planned to make these baked pumpkin doughnuts (recipe) – but i did not get around to it until now. I have to say – these are time-consuming little bastards. I only have two doughnut pans, each of which only holds six – but I had batter for… 36, so I had to keep doing this over and over again. Empty, clean, grease, refill, bake and — repeat! Yeah, I chose to do this, and maybe on a day when I was not trying to do 25 other things, it would be fine. But not today. Bastards! But they are done in any case. It remains to be seen (or tasted) how they have really turned out. They look okay and did not fall apart when I removed them from the pans – for my purposes (at this stage) that is all that matters.

Pumpkin doughnut bastards ready for the oven

Pumpkin doughnut bastards ready for the oven

And I guess going the extra mile to make a few more things is worthwhile – it’s the last bloody bake of the year!

Pumpkin doughnuts ready to eat

Pumpkin doughnuts ready to eat

I have been listening to music that is all a bit different for me – like Grace Jones. I remember the first time I saw Grace Jones on tv. I was a little kid, and I was not sure if she was a man or a woman. Not that I have anything remarkable to say about her, except that the Wikipedia page about her states that she is responsible for Dolph Lundgren’s acting career… so we have her to blame! Then again, what would the world be without Ivan Drago? Haha.

More recently I remember seeing her in a bit part in a weird fictional bio of Falco (Falco – Verdammt, wir leben noch!). I was confined on an airplane with a limited choice of entertainment, so thanks Lufthansa. I now know that story. I would otherwise never have heard of it. I certainly would have found no other way to see it.

Pumpkin doughnut plans

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I have never made doughnuts other than an ad-hoc attempt one year at making chrusciki, which are not doughnuts per se but are a fried dough of sorts.Frying is a pain, and traditional doughnuts don’t really seem like the kind of thing I want to bother with (or transport to the office, which is the final destination for most of my baked stuff).

I found a pumpkin baked doughnut recipe recently and wanted to try it for Halloween. I went to considerable effort when I was recently in the US to get a few doughnut pans. And then I did not in the end get around to making the doughnuts. But the time is coming.

Pumpkin doughnut recipe

Doughnuts

1/2 cup vegetable oil

3 large eggs

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 1/2 cups pumpkin puree

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ginger

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 3/4 cups + 2 tablespoons flour

Preheat oven to 350F/175C.

Beat all ingredients except flour until smooth. Add the flour to the mixture, stirring just until smooth.

Lightly grease two doughnut pans. Fill the pan sections about 3/4 full.

Bake the doughnuts for 15-18 minutes or until a toothpick placed in the center of the doughnuts comes out clean.

Remove from the oven, let sit for five minutes and loosen the edges of the doughnuts and transfer to a rack to cool.

Cinnamon-sugar doughnut coating

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ginger

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

some sugar

Mix all together in a plastic Ziploc bag (for example). When doughnuts are warm but not fragile, place them into the bag of spice mix and gently shake to coat the doughnuts.